The location is “unpromising” (“between a huge flyover and an industrial estate”), but Sat Bains’s “inspirational” cooking can be “absolutely stunning”; even fans (“best meal ever!”) can find prices “shocking”, though, and the whole experience sometimes seems too “up-tight” to really sing.
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The critic makes his “finest discovery of the year” at this implausbibly-located restaurant, where a “Sikh [chef] has mastered modern French cooking and flipped it on its head’. Bains, we’re told, is ‘[s]imply… the most wildly inventive chef to emerge from Britain since Heston Blumenthal”. ‘My (trifling) reservation is that Bains is growing a little comfortable with celebrity. He signs a menu for us, but isn't an autograph one of those rare gifts to be bestowed only upon request?”
Matthew Norman (25th June 2007)
9.5/10
And other hugely positive review, this time for “a Sikh guy producing some incredible cooking on what’s admittedly the more rustic end of an industrial estate in Nottingham”. The setting may be “a conservatory offering as fine a view of electricity pylons as you could wish for”, but the critic’s starter – in which pieces of juicy, crispy-skinned quail worked to perfection with artichoke hearts, asparagus and a salad topped with shavings of Parmesan – showed “genuine brilliance”. And so it continued. “This is clever, complex, highly imaginative, technically brilliant food served with warmth and charm in a restaurant (with rooms, for those who want to set about the wine list) that is splendid in every regard.”
Jasper Gerard (27th April 2009)
Matthew Norman (25th June 2007)
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